The Supreme Court's conservative majority wouldn't say it. Justice Elena Kagan made sure it's on the record anyway.
On Thursday (June 25), the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe to let the Trump administration end Temporary Protected Status for more than 330,000 Haitian nationals and several thousand Syrians, clearing the way for their work permits and protection from deportation to expire.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito concluded that none of Trump's or former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's public statements about Haiti were "overtly racial," and that the TPS statute generally bars courts from reviewing the secretary's decision at all.
Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wasn't having it. In her dissent, she did something the majority pointedly avoided: she quoted Trump directly.
"The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print," Kagan wrote. She then printed them anyway — including Trump's claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were "eating the dogs… they're eating the cats," that Haitians "probably have AIDS," that Haiti is a "shithole country" that is "filthy, dirty, disgusting," and his 2025 remark asking, "Why is it we only take people from shithole countries" like "Haiti and Somalia" instead of "Norway and Sweden."
Alito's opinion did acknowledge Haiti's difficult conditions, writing that "poverty and deprivation are no reflection on character," but concluded the statements amounted to "policy views that could rest on" reasons unrelated to race. Referring to lead plaintiff Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, Alito wrote that the plaintiffs were trying "to capitalize on the statements' heated language."
Kagan's response was direct. "The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President's resolve to remove Haitians from this country," she wrote.
The ruling didn't stop at the constitutional question. The majority also held that the TPS statute's judicial-review bar blocks courts from second-guessing nearly all of the Homeland Security secretary's decisions on the program — meaning even claims that the administration skipped legally required procedures generally cannot be heard in court at all.
Kagan warned the practical effect is stark: the secretary can now "announce to the world that she didn't consult with anyone — more, that she didn't evaluate country conditions at all — before making, extending, or terminating a TPS designation. And the courts will be powerless to intervene."
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a separate concurrence, arguing that even if courts could review constitutional claims generally, noncitizens cannot sue the federal government for equal-treatment violations in the first place, since he contends that guarantee applies only to the states.
Losing TPS does not mean automatic deportation — many affected individuals may have other paths to legal status, such as asylum or family-based petitions. But for most, it means the loss of legal work authorization and renewed exposure to removal proceedings.
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